European Mis-Adventures

Thoughts on the Snow. Hint: I'm over it.

This is a post that I've been meaning to write for awhile, but put off a few times, because I promise, I will do my very best to not sound like I'm just complaining about the snow. Keep in mind though that I'm from California, where when you want snow in the winter, you drive a couple hours to visit it, and when you are done a day or two later, you can drive back down the mountain to the warmth. That isn't exactly the case here in Munich.

Berlin Marathon Race Recap

At the top of the blog, what does it say? That thing about me training for two marathons, yeah, about that. To train for a marathon, you have to run. A lot. For months. Literally, training programs last a minimum of four months. Four months ago, want to know where I was? Norway. Then Greece. Then California. Then jet lagged in Germany. Then... You get the point. Combined with me still not being excited about training for another marathon so soon after the Paris marathon, meant I just didn't have it in me to train and then run the Berlin marathon. Not so for Greg. He was diligent about training around our travels to Prague and London and again, you get the point: travel doesn't make training easy and we are phenomenally lucky for this whole Europe experience. No, Greg didn't do a perfect training regimen, but he did enough that he was mostly ready for running Berlin. And so considering the reduced training schedule, and a week of Oktoberfest right before the marathon, he did great!

 

Munich's English Garden - on a run

One of the reasons we enjoy Munich is that we got an apartment very close to the English Garden, which is akin to New York's Central Park or SF's Golden Gate Park. This means it is both rather large (approximately 3.75 miles long) and has a wide variety of sights along the way to keep the run interesting. We have a usual loop we run and depending on which exact paths we take is between 8-8.5 miles long, so these are some of the sights along our loop.

To start, we usually run a couple miles along the Isar River, which is on one side of the garden, and has a path that literally looks like this for a couple miles: lovely tree canopy. Even in the wintertime when the leaves have mostly fallen, there are enough branches that it still arches over and is fun to run through.

London Sights: Olympic marathon and changing of the guards

Women's Olympic Marathon:

Our time in London was during the Olympics, and despite the press coverage about all the empty seats at the events, trying to get tickets to fill those seats as remarkably difficult. Fortunately, Greg and I are runners, and the marathon doesn't require a ticket to watch the bulk of the 26.2 miles. Meaning, Greg was a good sport who let us get up early to be sure we got a good spot along the course. We were early enough that we each got to pretend run on the course. Not my best form, but the fake crowds went wild as I pretend won!

Paris Marathon Recap: Allez Andrea!

It has taken me a few days to have enough perspective to write this, and I'm still not at a point where I can put my thoughts in a coherent format, so here are various ramblings on the race.

If you just want my thoughts from during the race, skip to the second half of the text.

16 miles. Aka, 16 tons and what do you get.

Apparently, I like having a song title in my posts. This one's a throwback to the 50's or 60's, but that's not the point of this post. I wanted to try to describe what it was like for us to do our first long run here in Munich. In all honesty, this was really our second attempt at a long run here.